"[The snowpack is] a good sign for water suppliers and for California's agricultural community, who have been dealing with almost no deliveries from the state water project for the last few years," Michael Heberger, a researcher at the Pacific Institute in Oakland, said, NatGeo noted.

"It shows that our outlook is better but it doesn't necessarily mean that we're out of the woods or that the drought is over," he added.

Brown mandated that Californians cut their water use by 25 percent because of the Sierra Nevada's puny snowpack in 2015, KFSN-TV reported. The television station stated that surveyors found 58.4 inches of snow at Phillips Station and statewide, potential snowpack water at 87 percent of average.

KFSN-TV said the state depends on the mountain snow water runoff to keep reservoirs full throughout the year.

"We're barely average. It stops that downward slide. Now we're clearly looking at next year, and there are no reliable indicators of what next year will bring," Gehrke said.

California gets about 30 percent of its water supply from the Sierra Nevada snowpack on normal years, according to NatGeo. That snowpack gradually melts, releasing water into rivers and into reservoirs where it is used by the majority of the residents.